47 thoughts on “Monday Message Board”

Newman and Seeney suing Alan Jones for defamation seems to be – politically – a really stupid thing to do a week before an election where very real questions about appearances of corruption, interference in the judiciary and pre-2012-election lying will be key, if not deciding, factors in the outcome.

LNP MPs suing Jones illustrates the old adage ‘no honour among thieves’. On talkback radio Jones urged thousands of web illiterate codgers to attend the anti carbon tax rally in Canberra. He did his own calcs on CO2 buildup which were only a few orders of magnitude out. However his co-plaintiff Seeney went one better by removing sea level rise as an issue for coastal developers. I gather a new coal mine will remove Jones’ old home town from the map, an understandable slight. On many issues Jones, Newman and Seeney are on the same wavelength yet they fell out.

Harry Clarke, on his new website, has an interesting review of Richard Tol’s latest book. Restrictions on links on this site will mean that readers will have to google the link. In his book on climate scenarios Richard Tol refers to the IPCC reports. Yet he has already judged the IPCC reports as being subjective

There has been no statistically significant change in the estimates over time. Nonetheless, subsequent assessment reports convey different messages in their Technical Summaries, with even greater deviations in the Summaries for Policy Makers. The IPCC should rely more strongly on objective methods.

In the lead up to Australia Day there has been an endless parade of the post-modern liberal usual suspects who claim that Australia is some amazingly diverse country which needs to refashion itself to “be relevant in the 21 C” or “define our place in the region”.

Or something.

People are entitled to their own opinions, no matter how fatuous. It is a free country, or supposed to be, until sufficient number of us turn into digitized versions of Stazi snitches.

But they are not entitled to their own facts. And the facts indicate that AUS is still an overwhelmingly Occidental country, largely identifying with Caucasian Europeans in race, Christian mainstream in religion and Constitutional monarch as ruler.

About 61.1% of the population denominate as Christian (ABS 2011)

About 58% of the population have an active support of the monarchy (Roy Morgan 2012).

Approximately 85% of the population have been genetically idetified as descendants of European settlers and immigrants. (Genome research 19.5 (2009): 804-814.)

So, for the foreseeable future, Australia will still be a nation that pays homage to a somewhat diluted version of the traditional trilogy God, Queen and Country.

The intractable nature of Australia’s moderate brand of social conservatism appears to drive post-modern liberals up the wall. Which probably accounts for their bilious and vitriolic reaction to innocuous displays of patriotism, such as wearing flag capes or sporting a Southern Cross tattoo.

And of course don’t start them on the idea of celebrating the arrival of the First Fleet. The fact that, in less than a hundred years, the Stale Pale Males were able to turn a prison colony situated at the ass-end of the world into the per capita richest nation on Earth, complete with the full suite of liberal democratic institutions, is sort of rubbing it in.

Talk about a stress test of the British model. The achievements of the current generation of elites don’t stack all that well to those of our ancestors.

Have you read that book by Robert Hughes, “The Fatal Shore”? That is an expose of the First Fleet and all the corruption, violence, ineptitude and small minded bourgeous hypochristianity and is tragic and very sad and hardly worth celebrating.

All that bitter and twisted stuff about post-modern liberals – who are these people specifically? Can you name names? Allan Jones perhaps?

I learned at my dad’s knee that patriotism turned into jingoism and was the last resort of knaves and the cause of wars; but really it’s the irrationality of the whole thing that is so silly and why I stay away from these ‘celebrations’ where people wear flags.

Doesn’t happen in my little town thank goodness. Actually nobody is going to organise anything this year I heard because there are only 5 people left on the Committee and they are all over 70 and very very few people turned up last year. Have you been to the regional areas lately?

It’s the hatred that has been added to that oi oi oi thing that creates the angst among your enemies and this angst is a real problem you refuse to acknowledge,…. or perhaps you can only see things from one point of view?

And if Southern Cross tats are so ok, why doesn’t Tony get one? People might like him more.

Tomorrow, I’ll be wearing my new t-shirt and thinking how good we could have been if we had worked with the blackfellas to integrate with them and build this country co-operatively.

Why are you so obsessed about our being an occidental and caucasian (white) country? Do you believe there is something special about white people? Are white people superior in your judgement? There is really no other construction that can be put upon this great emphasis of yours your “Holy Trinity” of being Caucasian, Christian and “Constitutional monarch as ruler” (sic). You might be surprised that when people talk about diversity they are mostly not talking about skin colour. They are quite correctly talking about cultural and language diversity.

As to us being Christian, well about 60% might nominally identify as Christian but very few act like true Christians so the Christian identification is operationally and morally meaningless. True Christians would not turn away the needy, like refugee boat people. True Christians would not harp on about their “Christian-ness” being a defining feature which legitimated rejecting other people rather than accepting and caring for them equally.

As for this nonsense of crying out “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi! Oi! Oi!” this was never a feature of the traditional Australia I grew up in and to which you nostalgically hark back. I mean the Australia where there was no black kid or Asian kid in a 700 student school and the Queen’s picture was on the front wall of every classroom.

You want to return to that era (White Australia) and also add in the jingostic, backward-looking yobbo’s identification call.

You don’t even identify what is really important and valuable in the Western tradition: democracy, science and humanism. Instead you fixate on skin colour, Christian nominalism and the Monarchy as a vestigal consitutional fetish.

“So, for the foreseeable future, Australia will still be a nation that pays homage to a somewhat diluted version of the traditional trilogy God, Queen and Country.”

Well, I am not sure since I am always saying about how the Queen should order all the parliament and subjects to stop causing climate change for God’s sake and our Country’s sake – but I have not noticed so many patriots that you remark upon flocking to agree with me so far…

Indeed no Oi Oi Oi would have been acceptable at any of the schools I went to during the 50’s and ’60’s. That sort of overt triumphalism was so ugly american and not what we Aussies were or wanted to be.

I wasn’t even supposed to sing God Save the Queen or stand up for the anthem at school – ‘we’ didn’t believe in that. But this was very difficult to do at the small schools that I mostly went to. We moved quite often at one stage.

I also wasn’t supposed to go to any religious instructions classes but my father had to give in about that also, because the schools wouldn’t, so he said that I was to choose any religious class I wanted, except the Catholic one, and then I was supposed to ask questions about what I was being told.

My questions didn’t go down well and I mostly got to stand outside the door and hope the principal didn’t walk past and see me although at one school I remember that I was allowed to do whatever I wanted except be part of the religious instruction class.

The regional areas are very different now and now we do get to see brown and black people out here; they are our doctors and physio’s, pharmacists and other professionals – those stale pale males – hehehe – don’t want to work out here in the bush and it’s only women and the other men who come out here and work.

I suppose it was these professionals who used to be on the committees that ran things in small towns and now there is no one who wants to do these community things to keep the halls and old buildings from just falling down. Our hall can’t be sold because it is owned by ‘the community’, and if the community can’t be bothered cooperating to keep it in good repair it will just fall down and rot like so many others have.

It seems that all the little towns around here built a ‘School of Art’s” Hall early last century but nobody cares about Art or Music now or looking after these reminders of what we were in the past.

And there are very few churches that still function, there are not enough white priests to minister to the needs of the ‘religious’ – the Hypochristians. Some people in my town and in the neighbouring towns are beginning to stand up to these people who claim moral superiority just because they go to church on Sunday to hang out with their like minded profit seeking peer group.

Recently, there was some criticism of the Catholic Ladies Association for ‘free-riding’ on an event that other people in town had organised and done all the work for. I have to admit that I was the one who pointed out that the behaviour of the Catholic Ladies could be called free-riding.

Yes, more “traditional” Australia was a strange mix being much more racist but also more community minded albeit only inclusive within the white community (the in-group). The arrival of different ethnic groups vastly improved and enriched our culture, especially our food, at least that is the aspect I have noticed over the years. The old anglo-aussie diet was very boring.

The greatest damage to our culture has been done by importing American cultural and economic attitudes and American eating habits. This is the area where foreign influence has been really damaging to us. Becoming more like the USA has been the worst thing that ever happened to Australia, especially the importation of neoliberalism (though we can blame England, Thatcher and the Adam Smith Insitute for that too), patriotic jingoism and the support of US imperialism and militarism.

Have you read that book by Robert Hughes, “The Fatal Shore”? That is an expose of the First Fleet and all the corruption, violence, ineptitude and small minded bourgeous hypochristianity and is tragic and very sad and hardly worth celebrating. All that bitter and twisted stuff about post-modern liberals – who are these people specifically? Can you name names? Allan Jones perhaps?

Yes, I have and yes I will. The FS is certainly the best of the very bad bunch of black-arm band histories. But I took from it exactly the opposite message that Hughes more literal-minded followers intended: AUS history is a triumphalist story when viewed in perspective of its inauspicious origins. Let the convict over-seers be as brutal and sadistic as you like, let the colonial officials be corrupt and venal, let the ministers of religion (Marsden my favourite) be sanctimonious and hypocritical, the net effect was a stupendous success story.

In this respect the history of AUS, up until say the late eighties, is very much like the history of modern science. The steady march of progress, with very little in the way of set-backs. And only one dark stain, the shabby treatment of indigenous people.

So its very hard to write a history of science or Australia without indulging in the occasional bout of Whiggish chest-thumping. Of course post-modern liberals (both Left- and Right-) managed it with ease, depicting life during the “Australian Settlement” as at best a stagnant and insular affair (Paul Kelly), at worst a long night of unimaginable oppression and exploitation (Humphrey McQueen). But then turning the truth on its head is the post-modernist area of expertise.

Here I follow Stove’s rough-and-ready definition of a post-modernist as an intellectual who indulges in “the Great Reversal”, not just random guesses about the world but actually a 180 degree turn around for what is actually the case. Stove cites Popper as the man who opened the flood-gates to Jazz Age post-modernism which has raced through every domain of intellectual life (epistemics, ethics, economics) like “blow-fly strike”:

In Austria the defeat of the central powers brought about the overturning of authority in almost every form: political authority, moral and religious authority, financial authority. As the old structures dissolved almost overnight, Marxism, Anarchism, Freudianism, Dadaism–any -ism, so long as it promised a Great Reversal–competed, not only for the minds of the young, but for government…For the mind of the young Popper, the fall of another and far more soundly based empire was no less formative: I mean the Newtonian empire in physics. In art, Western Europe found that its anti-academy had become its academy “even in the twinkling of an eye.” The galleries were suddenly full of the art of African societies formerly the most despised. Victorian architecture was all at once the object of a universal detestation, or rather horror. Black music began its long and excruciating revenge on the white man. The Jazz Age, in short, had arrived.

Cole Porter’s words “Anything goes” are not quite right for this situation, though; for they suggest random change, or anarchy. He is nearer the mark with “day’s night to-day,” “good’s bad today,” and so on; for these words convey the idea of reversal rather than of random change. Of course it is often not easy to keep the two ideas separated in one’s mind. Even the prophet Isaiah, when he says that “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low,” is open to the suspicion of being not quite clear in his own mind as to whether he is promising us a plain, or only new mountains where valleys were before. Still, the two ideas really are distinct, and it is the idea of reversal, rather than that of random change, which is the key to the Jazz Age.

Its interesting to compare the post-modernist black-arm banders to the modernists both Left- and Right-, such as Hancock, Ward, Gollan and of course Blainey. They all had their own ideological agendas, no doubt. And no doubt they had their blind spots. But they simply could not bring themselves to deny the obvious, that AUS was pretty much the best country in the world for the average man and his family. And that in the era of the Common Man this was an achievement of which we could be rightly proud.

Of course it was too good to last. Over the past 30 years or so every one else in the non-European world got wind of it and who can blame them for wanting to get a piece of the action? Certainly not me. What irks me is the way that liberal elites have systematically gone about trashing the achievements of our ancestors. (My father-in-law is a real dyed-in-the-wool farmer & mechanic whose ancestors were pretty much pioneers – they were so self-sufficient they built their own tools.) And not only that but they have been actively dismantling so many of the protections and privileges that came as a birth-right of AUS citizenship, particularly the fire-sale of publicly-owned utilities, breaking the promise of an affordable Australian Dream home and the dissipation of the priceless asset of national unity.

In return, what have we got for all this “gnashing of teeth and rending of garments”? Well somewhat better treatment of minority of minorities. Good as far as it goes but it doesn’t go very far and subject to the universal law of diminishing returns.

We had a great nation state but, as Franklin put it in a some-what different context, it will only remain so “if we can keep it”.

“Approximately 85% of the population have been genetically idetified as descendants of European settlers and immigrants.”

Wake up to yourself, Jack. 100% of the population is descendant from East Africa. Bogan-day alive and well in your part of the woods? Have fun celebrating a massacre, no matter however bizarre it may be to most right thinking people.

Jack, you’ve been previously advised that any reference to genetics or any related topic is off-limits. Take a week off commenting. In particular, don’t comment on the republic thread – I was going to relax the ban, but I can see you are in derailment mode.

I am not surprised that you would know better than Hughes himself, what his message was in his book The Fatal Shore.

The doco Hughes made in later life called The Fatal Shore Revisited revealed him to have turned into a pompous old fool with far too much self-serving self-esteem but you get that sort of personality change from those Aussies who go abroad and then believe they are better than those who stayed behind.

As far as your understanding of post-modernism goes, I think you are as ignorant of ‘post-modernism’ in all it’s complexity and lack of Truth, as the feminist post-modernist lecturers in the Vis Arts faculty at my Uni who really believed that post-modernism was the truth.

Your man Stove doesn’t sound very insightful so I won’t bother with what he said.

It seems to me that my father and the people our family associated with back in the ’50’s and 60’s who saw clearly how awful and ugly and stupid aspects of our society were and spoke about it was a black-armbander?

It really seems to me that you fail to understand anything much about the common man or woman in Australia, despite your claim to be a real Australian by dint of this; “My father-in-law is a real dyed-in-the-wool farmer & mechanic whose ancestors were pretty much pioneers – they were so self-sufficient they built their own tools.”

Guess what? People in my family and so many of my country born and bred neighbours still build their own tools. Some of us are still ‘resourceful’. We build gates out of other things; we don’t go to Bunnings unless we have to.

And my ancestor on my fathers side was Samuel Cook the first managing director of the Sydney Morning Herald. So by your reasoning does that give me more ‘authenticity’ and right to speak for the Australian common ‘man’?

Jack Strocchi does not even identify what is really important and valuable in the Western tradition: namely democracy, science and humanism. Instead he fixates on skin colour, Christian nominalism and the monarch as a symbolic remnant.

The above facts illustrate the facile nature of Strocchi’s political philosophy. He fixates on the shallowest of things: what is literally only skin-deep, nominal and symbolic. These superficial and trivial emblems (of whiteness, nominalism and symbolism) are the perfect representive motifs for the shallowness of Jack’s political-economic thought.

I don’t even care if Jack is banned from a response here. He approvingly quotes text that says;

“The galleries were suddenly full of the art of African societies formerly the most despised. Victorian architecture was all at once the object of a universal detestation, or rather horror. Black music began its long and excruciating revenge on the white man. The Jazz Age, in short, had arrived.”